U. S. employers delivered an early birthday gift to the nation, creating 288,000 more jobs than they destroyed in June, officials said Thursday.

Taken alone, the statistic qualifies as unblemished good economic news, a rare and wonderful thing since the Great Recession ended five years ago.

However — there’s always a “however” these days — there were some downers in the details of monthly employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But let’s not spoil the party just yet.

The unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, with the number of long-term unemployed declining by 293,000 to 3.1 million. The number of discouraged workers — those who’ve stopped looking because they believe there are no jobs for them — fell 34 percent from a year earlier.

What’s more, there was a healthy surge in hiring for higher-paying jobs in manufacturing, finance and professional and business services, on top of growth in low-wage sectors like retail and food services. And they worked more; aggregate hours rose at an annual rate of 4.4 percent in the second quarter, the strongest growth since pre-recession 2006.

As for the wider economy, this recovery has been the weakest since World War II, often on the verge of fizzling. Economists have said liftoff would require sustained job creation much closer to 300,000 a month than the range of 200,000 or less that’s persisted since 2011.

Well, now the economy has averaged growth of 272,000 jobs over the last three months. The bureau revised April’s seasonally adjusted total to 304,000 net new jobs.

It’s a genuine trend, one that sparked a few other statistical superlatives from the White House.

“... This is the first time since September 1999 (to) January 2000 we have seen total job growth above 200,000 for five straight months,” wrote Jason Furman, chief economic adviser to President Barack Obama. “Private employment has increased in 52 consecutive months, the longest streak on record … going back to 1939.”

Of course, this streak benefits from comparison to a shattered job market that shoved 800,000 people a month into unemployment in early 2009. And it’s still a long way from full recovery, a bit of key context that Furman also mentioned.

“While today’s jobs report is encouraging, many families are still struggling with long-term unemployment and wages that have been stagnant for decades,” he wrote on the White House blog.

That would be our cue to examine the clouds threatening this economic Fourth of July parade.

It’s entirely possible that this year’s spurt of job creation will turn out to be yet another ephemeral bounce. After all, total economic output shrank in the first quarter at a shocking annual rate of 2.9 percent.

Some economists blamed the harsh winter in much of the nation, which closed factories and kept consumers indoors. Yet others worried that the economy was heading for its next recession.

Federal tax hikes, followed by increases in many states including California, have taken money from consumers’ pockets. And bosses aren’t giving workers raises like they did in previous recoveries.